A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity

A Path Appears is even more ambitious in scale: nothing less than a sweeping tapestry of people who are making the world a better place and a guide to the ways that we can do the same - whether with a donation of $5 or $5 million, with our time, by capitalizing on our skills as individuals, or by using the resources of our businesses.

The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change

Adam Braun began working summers at hedge funds when he was just 16 years old, sprinting down the path to a successful Wall Street career. But while traveling as a college student, he met a young boy begging on the streets of India. When Braun asked the boy what he wanted most in the world, he simply answered, "A pencil." This small request became the inspiration for Pencils of Promise, the organization Braun would leave a prestigious job at Bain & Company to start with just $25 at the age of 24.

Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits

Great nonprofits spend as much time working with institutions outside their four walls as they do managing their internal operations. They use the power of leverage to become greater forces for good. This landmark book reveals the six powerful practices of 12 high-impact nonprofits and tells their compelling stories.

Charity Case: How the Nonprofit Community Can Stand Up for Itself and Really Change the World

Virtually everything our society has been taught about charity is backwards. We deny the social sector the ability to grow because of our short-sighted demand that it send every short-term dollar into direct services. Yet if the sector cannot grow, it can never match the scale of our great social problems. In the face of this dilemma, the sector has remained silent, defenseless, and disorganized. In Charity Case, Pallotta proposes a visionary solution: a Charity Defense Council to re-educate the public.

Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs

Muhammad Yunus, the practical visionary who pioneered microcredit and won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his world-changing efforts, here develops his revolutionary new concept that promises to redeem the failed promise of free enterprise: social business.

Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

Find Me Unafraid tells the uncommon love story between two uncommon people whose collaboration sparked a successful movement to transform the lives of vulnerable girls and the urban poor. With a foreword by Nicholas Kristof.

The Solution Revolution: How Business, Government, and Social Enterprises Are Teaming Up to Solve Society’s Toughest Problems

It’s clear that in today’s era of fiscal constraints and political gridlock, we can no longer turn to government alone to tackle towering social problems. What’s required is a new, more collaborative and productive economic system. The Solution Revolution brings hope - revealing just such a burgeoning new economy where players from across the spectrum of business, government, philanthropy, and social enterprise converge to solve big problems and create public value.

Start Something That Matters

What matters most to you? Should you focus on earning a living, pursuing your passions, or devoting yourself to the causes that inspire you? The surprising truth is that you don’t have to choose—and that you’ll find more success if you don’t. That’s the breakthrough message of the TOMS One for One movement. You don’t have to be rich to give back and you don’t have to retire to spend every day doing what you love. You can find profit, passion, and meaning all at once—right now.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future

Today, not only is everything digital getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, we also have the Internet. When these two revolutions - one in technology and the other in communications - joined, an explosive force was unleashed that changed the very nature of innovation. And with any change, we have seen many strategic blunders and extraordinary learning curves along the way.

The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao

The Souls of China tells the story of one of the world's great spiritual revivals. Following a century of violent antireligious campaigns, China is now filled with new temples, churches, and mosques - as well as cults, sects, and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Driving this explosion of faith is uncertainty - over what it means to be Chinese and how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality a century ago and is searching for new guideposts.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

An old Chinese proverb says "Women hold up half the sky." Then why do the women of Africa and Asia persistently suffer human rights abuses? Continuing their focus on humanitarian issues, journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn take us to Africa and Asia, where many women live in profoundly dire circumstances.

Great leaders anticipate the future. But the reality is that the vast majority of people fear the unknown. Most would rather stick with the status quo than go somewhere new, especially because they know change is hard and risky. According to Nancy Duarte, acclaimed author of Resonate, and Patti Sanchez, a communications expert, change doesn't have to be so hard. With the right communication tools, leaders can inspire others to long for a brighter future and move them to make it a reality.

Pattern Recognition

Cayce Pollard is an expensive, spookily intuitive market-research consultant. In London on a job, she is offered a secret assignment: to investigate some intriguing snippets of video that have been appearing on the Internet. An entire subculture of people is obsessed with these bits of footage, and anybody who can create that kind of brand loyalty would be a gold mine for Cayce's client. But when her apartment is burgled and her computer hacked, she realizes there's more to this project than she had expected.

People over Profit: Break the System, Live with Purpose, Be More Successful

Every day major headlines tell the story of a new and better American marketplace. Established corporations have begun reevaluating the quality of their products, the ethics of their supply chains, and how they can give back by donating portions of their profits to meaningful causes. Meanwhile millions of entrepreneurs who want a more responsible and compassionate marketplace have launched a new breed of socially focused business models.

Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

In 1983, Muhammad Yunus established Grameen, a bank devoted to providing the poorest of Bangladesh with miniscule loans. Believing that credit is a basic human right, not the privilege of a few, Yunus aimed to support that spark of personal initiative and enterprise by which the poor might lift themselves out of poverty forever. Grameen Bank now provides over $2.5 billion in micro-loans to more than two million families in rural Bangladesh.

Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

A seasoned war correspondent, Jeffrey Gettleman has covered every major conflict over the past 20 years, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Congo. For the past decade, he has served as the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, fulfilling his teenage dream of living in Africa. Love, Africa is the story of how he got there - and of his difficult, winding path toward becoming a good reporter and a better man.

The Samurai's Garden: A Novel

The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Gail Tsukiyama uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for her unusual story about a 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen who is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight.

The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi

In this follow-up to her acclaimed 2007 novel The Bastard of Istanbul, Turkish author Elif Shafak unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives---one contemporary and the other set in the 13th century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz---that together incarnate the poet's timeless message of love.

Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption

"Sometimes I want to spend hours talking with my best friends about boys and fashion and school and life. I want to go to the gym; I want my hair to look nice; I want to be allowed to wear jeans. I want to be a normal young woman living in America, sometimes. But I want other things more. All the time. I want to be spiritually and emotionally filled every day. I want to be loved and cuddled by a hundred children and never go a day without laughing.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over 40 years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

A pathbreaking neuroscientist reveals how our social instincts turn Me into Us, but turn Us against Them - and what we can do about it. The great dilemma of our shrinking world is simple: never before have those we disagree with been so present in our lives. The more globalization dissolves national borders, the more clearly we see that human beings are deeply divided on moral lines - about everything from tax codes to sexual practices to energy consumption - and that, when we really disagree, our emotions turn positively tribal.

Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

As a pastor working in a neighborhood with the highest concentration of murderous gang activity in Los Angeles, Gregory Boyle created an organization to provide jobs, job training, and encouragement so that young people could work together and learn the mutual respect that comes from collaboration.

Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

In an eye-opening tour of the unconscious, as contemporary psychological science has redefined it, Timothy D. Wilson introduces us to a hidden mental world of judgments, feelings, and motives that introspection may never show us. This is not your psychoanalyst's unconscious. The adaptive unconscious that empirical psychology has revealed, and that Wilson describes, is much more than a repository of primative drives and conflict-ridden memories.

Audible Editor Reviews

What a joy to hear humanitarian and founder of the Acumen Fund Jacqueline Novogratz tell her story of how she evolved from a bright, young international banker to a remarkable philanthropist working to close the gaps between rich and poor across continents. Novogratz, now in her 40s, narrates her journey in The Blue Sweater with an awareness of her personal growth over the years. She approaches the beginning of her journey as a young women sent to Africa with great naiveté and excitement in her voice. As the story advances, leading up to her greatest accomplishment, the founding of the non-profit Acumen Fund to fight global poverty, her narration reflects the understanding and character development her experiences offered her.

The Blue Sweater is both autobiographical and informative, a memoir of someone with striking conviction to make a difference in the most depressed of economic climates. Novogratz is likable from the start, and her story becomes more inspiring as the chapters progress. To most of us, global poverty seems too big of an issue to even comprehend, much less to tackle from home. Novogratz brings the issue closer to the listener by exploring the inadequacies of our current approaches and offering solutions that she works to implement with the Acumen Fund. The Blue Sweater is an accessible listen for everyone, financially inclined or otherwise, and Novogratz never carries a tone of condescension. (She is just as quick to acknowledge her failures as her achievements.) Rather, she offers her story of discovery and eye-opening experiences as a call to arms.

Novogratz is a true citizen of the world, an idealist driven by her belief that we are all “interconnected”. The Blue Sweater is a riveting account of her journey towards the Acumen Fund; to hear Novogratz narrate her memoir is to embark upon that journey right alongside her. Suzanne Day

Publisher's Summary

The Blue Sweater is the inspiring story of a woman who left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it.

It all started back home in Virginia, with the blue sweater, a gift that quickly became her prized possession - until the day she outgrew it and gave it away to Goodwill. Eleven years later in Africa, she spotted a young boy wearing that very sweater, with her name still on the tag inside. That the sweater had made its trek all the way to Rwanda was ample evidence, she thought, of how we are all connected, how our actions - and inaction - touch people every day across the globe, people we may never know or meet.

From her first stumbling efforts as a young idealist venturing forth in Africa to the creation of the trailblazing organization she runs today, Novogratz tells gripping stories with unforgettable characters - women dancing in a Nairobi slum, unwed mothers starting a bakery, courageous survivors of the Rwandan genocide, entrepreneurs building services for the poor against impossible odds.

She shows, in ways both hilarious and heartbreaking, how traditional charity often fails, but how a new form of philanthropic investing called "patient capital" can help make people self-sufficient and can change millions of lives.

More than just an autobiography or a how-to guide to addressing poverty, The Blue Sweater is a call to action that challenges us to grant dignity to the poor and to rethink our engagement with the world.

What the Critics Say

"This is a wonderful book by a remarkable woman. It's a story about doing enormous good while having some extraordinary experiences and even adventures. It touches the heart and the mind. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about what's really going on in the world out there." (Fareed Zakaria, editor at large, Time magazine; host, CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS)

"Jacqueline's book and her work represent an entirely new way to look at things, a vivid opportunity for change and most of all, an obligation to spread the word about the way the world has evolved. We need to wake up and listen to what she has to say. Hurry!" (Seth Godin, author of Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us and Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable)

"If you believe in the worth and capacity of individual initiative and in group commitment, or if you believe that our lives can be transformed by the events we live through, then you must read this book." (Daniel Toole, UNICEF Regional Director for South Asia)

While the central tenet is allied with those held by academics like Dambisa Moyo and William Easterly, who argue that development aid (not to be confused with humanitarian aid) is a hindrance more than a service, Jacqueline Novogratz’s ‘The Blue Sweater’ is a personal, reflective and deeply humane testament to the power of economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Partly a heartfelt reflection on her years in Rwanda, before and after the 1994 genocide and partly a lighthearted memoir of a young activist trying to find where she is welcome (and more amusingly, where she is not) in the world around her, this book is a warmly toned, inspiriting guide to making a difference in our communities.

Yes. This is a beautiful, honest memoir, as well as a crash course on micro-lending and development for the poor. Novogratz is very good at describing her experiences, missteps, and successes without revision; she writes about what she learned, the people she met, the places she grew to love. I especially like the parts involving Rwanda. The audio quality is also good, and Novogratz is fun to listen to.

I enjoy mysteries, NOT thrillers, contemporary fiction, especially about diverse cultures, and sometimes history, if it doesn't involve too many dates. I often listen to a book multiple times, discovering unnoticed details in the retelling.

Where does The Blue Sweater rank among all the audiobooks you???ve listened to so far?

I highly recommend this book; it's one of the best I've listened to in 2012. For honesty, I applaud Ms. Novogratz. She points out her mistakes along the path she followed, often into dangerous situations, because of a naive understanding of the culture she was attempting to change.

What does Jacqueline Novogratz bring to the story that you wouldn???t experience if you just read the book?

She is passionate about helping those in the 3rd world and that passion comes through wonderfully in her narration.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

It gave me hope that young (and old) people who wish to help those in very different cultures will be willing to use Ms. Novogratz' experience as guidance in their endeavors.

Any additional comments?

Novogratz' gives lots of proof that most of the money we throw at eliminating poverty is essentially thrown to the wind. She also outlines how that waste can be transformed to actual, long-term help.

Everyone should read this book. Especially those who live by the status quo - too many Americans take clean water & health & housing for granted & all they do is complain about their favorite football team or how much gas cost. Enough already.

I read this as supplement to an international studies class, but it was so compelling I would have read it voluntarily. Novogratz addresses the flaw in the current system of foreign aid and using her long compelling experience in the field suggests a superior long lasting system.

In addition to this niche topic she addresses in so many words the human condition and tells her first and second hand accounts of major world events she was tied to: Rwandan Genocide, 9/11, others.

This book is above all else an easily digestible story that forever one to question their beliefs and develop character.

The honesty! It's so nice to hear about the mistakes and bumps that many people in the field try to hide. It makes her path and work seem more realistic, attainable, and inspiring. I wish I'd read this before I worked abroad and maybe I would have had a step up! I recommend it for everyone, but especially people going to work in developing countries. I also liked how diplomatic and uncynical she was, when that does not seem the trend in the field. Towards the end, it started to sound a bit more like an ad for the Acumen Fund, but even that wasn't unwelcome. I didn't have a full understanding of how the organization worked and this was the best possible package for finding out! With such the organization's great, but not necessarily intuitive (methodology-wise) work, I think she needed to put this out there. She was also an excellent reader with warmth in her voice-- very easy to listen to. And so likable... be my friend, Jacqueline!